WazirX, the Indian cryptocurrency exchange, had scheduled a maintenance period to restore account balances and reverse specific trades following a major security breach. WazirX made this announcement on its social media platform, X. The maintenance occured from 6 p.m. on August 15 to 2 a.m. IST on August 16, during which all services on the platform were temporarily unavailable.
The attack happened on July 18 and led to the theft of $234.9m worth of cryptocurrency assets. This hack was discovered by Web3 security firm Cyvers, who observed that some transactions from the Ethereum network belonged to the WazirX Safe Multisig wallet. This case has affected WazirX, causing the management to take prompt measures to protect the rest of the funds and rectify the situation.
To this end, WazirX is already positioning itself to regain the user’s trust through better security features and increased transparency. In this regard, they aim to release a list of new wallets once the migration process is complete for users to join. The maintenance is meant to correct the current distortions due to the hack. In addition to this, WazirX intends to reverse all transactions on its platform to adjust account balances to reflect the amounts transferred on July 18.
Confusion Grows as WazirX and Liminal Blame Each Other for Security Breach
The hack has triggered controversy between WazirX and Liminal, the platform on which the companies operate their multisignature wallets. Liminal denies that its platform got hacked, while WazirX argues that the breach originates from flaws in Liminal’s design. According to the information presented by Liminal, the breach was due to tampered WazirX devices, which increased the level of confusion.
On August 14, WazirX revealed that the rest of the assets were being transferred to new multisignature wallets with Liminal to enhance security measures. At the same time, the hacker has cashed out a majority of the stolen altcoins—around 148 million—to Ether to prevent freezing or blacklisting of the funds.
